


Ward (Protect)

by KLStarre



Category: A Crown of Candy - Fandom, Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:41:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23797087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre
Summary: Theobald of House Gumbar, ward of the Princess Lazuli of House Rocks, is not a knight. He doesn’t even have a sword. He’s made a practice one, out of sticks, and he hacks at the castle wall with it.
Relationships: Theobald Gumbar & Archmage Lazuli
Comments: 23
Kudos: 124





	Ward (Protect)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written directly after episode three, so it will likely soon no longer be canon compliant! I don't care!

Theobald of House Gumbar, ward of the Princess Lazuli of House Rocks, is not a knight. He doesn’t even have a sword. He’s made a practice one, out of sticks, and he hacks at the castle wall with it. One of the other kids (there are always other kids in the castle) asks him why he’s only using one arm, once, and he stares at them, confused. The other arm is holding the shield. Of course. Just because he doesn’t actually _have_ a shield doesn’t make it any less important to practice what it will be like when he does.

He watches the real knights practice, sometimes, when he has a free moment. They charge each other with reckless abandon, swinging with swords and using their shields like they’re secondary, almost an annoyance. They take blows on their armor that, Theo thinks, could be easily deflected with the shield at the right angle. When they practice fighting together, instead of one against another, they rarely protect each other.

And still, when Theo stares down the hard, stone wall of the castle where he’s grown up, he brandishes his imaginary shield with the same intensity with which he brandishes his stick.

The Princess Lazuli spends most of her time in the library and so, when Theo isn’t pretending he’s wearing armor and stabbing things, he’s pretending he’s wearing armor and standing guard over her. He stands over her shoulder as she reads, three steps back, staring straight ahead. There’s nothing he could do if someone tried to hurt her, and he knows that, but it’s the ritual of the thing that matters.

“Do you want to learn magic?” Princess Lazuli asks Theo, one day, and he doesn’t know how to tell her that that is so far from what he wants.

“It can be learned?” he asks, instead.

“Of course.” She motions for him to sit beside her, and after a moment, he joins her at the long, wooden table. At a respectable distance, of course. He knows his place. “This book is about cantrips,” she says, pulling the thinnest from her stack. “Cantrips are easy spells, they don’t require a lot of magic. Do you think you could try to cast one?”

Theobald is not a smart boy. He’s not dumb, either, not by any stretch of the imagination, but there is nothing in his life that has prepared him for the words and symbols swimming on the page, demanding to be committed to memory. Never has he felt any real interest in what Princess Lazuli is discovering, and never has he wanted to learn it for himself. But the princess wishes it, and so he reads the book on cantrips.

∞

Theo spends months trying to learn Green Flame Blade and is thirteen by the time he feels bold enough to talk to Princess Lazuli about it. “I think I need a sword,” he says, not looking her in the eyes, because she has never been anything but kind to him, but he knows that he is not supposed to make demands of royalty.

She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t order him executed, or drawn and quartered, or thrown into the disused dungeons. The Princess Lazuli just laughs. “Of course you do,” she says, and the next day he has a sword.

After that, it comes easy. He can focus on the heft of the blade in his hand and watch as green light surges down it, spiking off into nothingness because he has nothing else to hit. But it is magic, nonetheless, and once he’s sure he has it perfect, he presents it to her, barely able to keep the grin off his face.

Theo swings his first sword into the practice dummy that he’s now built for himself and keeps in his quarters, and everything flashes green, and he blasts a hole in the wall, and the princess applauds.

“That was perfect!” she says, as she repairs the wall with a wave of her hand. And, the thing is, Theo’s never really had a particular interest in magic, but the other thing is, it feels _incredible_ to wield a real sword and to know he can make it stronger if he wants to. It feels like maybe, if he were standing guard over the princess in the library and someone tried to hurt her, he'd be able to hold them up long enough for them to get away. This fantasy ends with him dying, but it’s dying having done his duty – duty, where did that word come from? – and so it seems fine to him.

“Do you want to learn a real spell?” Lazuli asks, and it’s back to square one.

∞

When Theo turns fourteen, Princess Lazuli gives him a shield and tells him that he can train as a squire, if he wants to. There is something unspoken there, about how he can be a squire, but he can never be a knight, because he is a ward and international tensions are mounting and who can be trusted, really?

Theobald Gumbar does not cry when he closes the straps of his new shield around his left arm and holds it in front of himself and watches the sunlight bounce off of it, but he comes close.

He starts his training as a squire the next day, years behind some of the others. It is hard, and painful, and exhausting. He still doesn’t know how to use the shield that feels so right on his arm, and no one seems inclined to teach him, so he trains himself, at night, for hours at a time. He doesn’t sleep, he eats more than he’s ever eaten, and he tears the skin on his palms open over and over until the calluses heal in the shape of his sword’s hilt. It’s awful. He can barely stay awake for magic lessons, and every day he watches the real knights pass by, and he drills, and he dreams.

Never in his life has he been happier.

After he wins his first practice tourney (it doesn’t _mean_ anything, but also it does), he goes to Princess Lazuli’s chambers to practice magic. It’s getting more dangerous to do, out in the open, but he’s found that he _misses_ it when he’s not doing it. Magic isn’t something Theo had ever wanted to learn, but it’s something he’d been taught by the person who cared about him the most, and so it’s woven its way into his being.

“Do you want to try a different spell, Sir Theo?” Princess Lazuli asks, when he arrives, because they’ve been practicing this one for weeks and he can’t seem to get it to work. He is not a knight, and he certainly doesn’t have a title, and they both know this, but by the Bulb above it’s a beautiful fantasy.

“No,” he says. He’s not going to fail her. Deep breath, eyes closed. Muttering ancient words under his breath. His mind drifts to the tourney, to the sword at his side and the practice lance in his hand and to unseating one squire and then another. And then it goes to throwing up his shield just fast enough to defend himself, to noticing that one of the other boys was _actually_ hurt, to crossing the space between them in a second and throwing himself in the way of one of the older girls trying to stab down at him with her blunted weapon.

And…something happens. His hands feel warm, his heart speeds up, and then…nothing.

“Theo!” he hears Princess Lazuli exclaim, but it sounds like her voice is coming from behind some sort of barrier, or like he’s underwater. He’s screwed it up again, and he doesn’t want to open his eyes and see what he hasn’t been able to do.

“Sir Theo, look, you’ve done it!”

Theo opens his eyes, and in front of him is a Sprinkle, bright blue and humming. It’s not exactly the kind of familiar he’s fantasized about, but it’s _there_. He’s _done_ it. And Princess Lazuli looks legitimately proud of him, like he’s done something impressive, even though he’s seen her throw balls of fire with a wave of her hand.

“A sprinkle.” He reaches a hand out to it, and it pushes up against him. _Magic_.

∞

Theo is almost nineteen when the war starts. He is not a knight. He is barely even a man. But there comes a time when all who can must go to war, and he goes.

He thinks Archmage Lazuli thinks he’s excited about it, and he doesn’t know how to tell her that he’s never wanted to hurt anyone. Never wanted to kill. He’s only almost-nineteen, and already has scars from throwing his body in front of other people.

Soon, he will have more.

∞

The Ravening War has killed nearly the entirety of House Rocks before it is decided that more knights are needed. Theobald Gumbar kneels before the new King Amethar. He is in his armor, head down, eyes open. Archmage Lazuli is dead, and when she dismissed him, he had left, and yet, somehow, he is being knighted. It doesn’t feel right. A knight is supposed to do his _duty_. Not to let the woman who raised him die.

“Theobald Gumbar,” says the voice of the king, and Theo bends his head lower. “Do you swear on the crown that you will in the future be faithful to the monarch of Castle Candia, never cause them harm, and observe your homage to them completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit?”

Theo thinks of the screams when Archmage Lazuli had died. He thinks of Sprinkle, at his side, even in this holy ceremony. “I do so swear.”

His helmet is off for the occasion, and so the cold metal of the King’s Sword is heavy against his head before the king removes it and sheathes it. “Then rise, Sir Theobald Gumbar, knight of the realm.”

Theo stands, and he looks his king in the eye as King Amethar presents him the sword and shield of the Kingsguard.

“My sister trusted you,” King Amethar says, holding Theo’s eye contact steadily. “And that is enough for me, my knight.”


End file.
